Although it’s hard for us Linux fanatics to delve in the world of Windows, as it seems, we all need to embrace Windows in time to time for some specific tasks. Linux, despite all its rewards, is still not the household name among regular computer users and chances are that most of your non-technical friends use Windows as their primary system. So, if you want to share some standard software or play those latest games, Windows is still the way to go. However, it’s impossible for us Linux folks to shift on Windows permanently and overlook the flexibility Linux has been affording us over the years. Luckily, a comprehensive set of powerful Windows emulators for Linux exists to make our life more comfortable and allow us the benefits of both systems concurrently.

In the wake of the ongoing US-Huawei-Google tussle, many Android enthusiasts are wondering about the different alternative phone operating systems that are out there. We have Apple’s iOS at our disposal, but the cost of owning an iPhone makes it an impossible choice for many.

This prompted me to create a list of other Android alternatives that are being developed or being used in mobile devices. The options that have been included in this list are open source, so any developer can grab the code and fork it to create something new for free. Huawei is itself creating its own operating system but I haven’t included it on this as the details are scarce.

With the help of Natural Language Processing, an organisation can gain valuable insights, patterns, and solutions. Python is one of the widely used languages and it is implemented in almost all fields and domains. In this article, we list down 10 important Python Natural Language Processing Language libraries.

On June 27th, Red Hat will not only be hosting one of the best technical gatherings of 2019, but it will be doing so in Washington D.C. — not San Francisco, Seattle, or ... DevNation Federal conference will bring together industry experts and key maintainers of popular open source projects in a one-day immersive conference for federal developers.

The bug report count of KTextEditor (implementing the editing part used in Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/Kile/…) and Kate itself reached again some value over 200.

If you have time and need an itch to scratch, any help to tackle the currently open bugs would be highly appreciated.

The full list can be found with this bugs.kde.org query.

[...]

The team working on the code is small, therefore please be a bit patient if you wait for reactions. I hope we have improved our reaction time in the last months but we still are lacking in that respect.

In the last month, we’ve polished the user interface and added the last planned features to Blender 2.80. The details can be found in the weekly development notes.

Now we are freezing the user interface, so that there is a stable base for creating documentation and tutorials. Settings will stay in the same place and screenshots should remain valid for the final 2.80 release. A handful of menu entries may be added, or a tooltip might be improved, but nothing major that would break documentation.

In order to meet the July release target for Blender 2.80, there is now an API and user-interface freeze on this next feature update for this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software.

Blender 2.80 has now entered its UI and API freeze milestone for the 2.80 release. The Blender settings should also be maintained now moving forward for the Blender 2.80 release and its Python API compatibility, including for add-ons.

24 May: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally,
the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.

While FreeBSD 12 is the latest and greatest stable series since the end of last year, for those still on FreeBSD 11 there is the 11.3 update due out for release in July while this weekend the first beta was issued.

FreeBSD 11.3 offers up the latest security updates and other stable bug fixes over FreeBSD 11.2 that was released nearly one year ago. But for those craving all the latest features and functionality, FreeBSD 12 is in release form or there is also FreeBSD 13-CURRENT.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a network protocol used for transferring files between a client and a server on a computer network. The very first FTP applications were made for the command line before GUI Operating Systems even became a thing and while there are several GUI FTP clients, developers still make CLI-based FTP clients for users who prefer using the old method.

The fact that you can run Docker containers on Windows as well as Linux is amazing. Yet, I sometimes struggle to see a clear use case for Windows containers. Compared to Linux containers, there are fewer obvious reasons to run containers on Windows.

I know that’s a somewhat controversial statement, so let me walk through the various reasons why Windows containers are much less attractive than Linux containers.

The new feature was first noticed by Keith I Myers. It is available in Chrome OS 76.0.3789.0, which is the first dev build of Chrome OS 76. It goes without saying that the feature is unstable right now. It is in the very early stages, so bugs and stability issues are to be expected. Also, keep in mind that GPU acceleration is only supported on a handful of Chromebooks...

For the past few years, it’s been possible on many Chromebooks to install the Play Store and run Android apps. This opened the door for Chromebooks to become more than just glorified web browsers. Now, Google is looking to make some major under-the-hood changes to Chrome OS’s Android apps support, which may allow for a long-requested feature.

AMD Raven Ridge APUs have been out for more than one year now and at least under Linux can still be quite problematic depending upon the particular motherboard BIOS and other factors. Fortunately, while Raven 2 and Picasso APU support is appearing to be in better shape, the AMD open-source developers haven't forgot about these problematic Raven 1 systems.

Out today is the latest patch trying to help those with original Raven Ridge systems. This latest hopeful fix is now skipping over loading the DMCU firmware for Raven Ridge. DMCU in this context is the Display Micro-Controller Unit and is the micro-controller used for Panel Self Refresh (PSR) and similar functionality.

Mule Creek Canyon is the PCH to be paired with Intel Elkhart Lake processors. Elkhart Lake as a reminder is the Gemini Lake SoC successor that will feature Gen11 class graphics and now thanks to the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver we know that new PCH is the Mule Creek Canyon.

Mule Creek Canyon doesn't appear to be widely publicized up to this point but appeared in today's latest open-source development activity. Mule Creek Canyon is the new PCH for Elkhart Lake and required some minor changes around Port-C remapping that differ from other Icelake graphics hardware.

A notable improvement was merged into the "xserver" Git tree for the eventual X.Org Server 1.21 release that will improve the support for various Linux games relying on XWayland for running under a Wayland compositor.

Check out this great keynote talk from our very own Rob Szumski, at this past week’s KubeCon Barcelona. This is hot off the presses, so to speak, as the CNCF has been uploading all of the amazing talks from that show over on it’s YouTube page, today. Hope this keeps you occupied over the long weekend!

In this episode of Let’s Talk, Abby Kearns, Executive Director of Cloud Foundry Foundation talks about the importance of all other cloud-native projects that are showcased at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. She also talks about Project Eirini.

GNOME 3.34 feature development continues at full-speed with a lot of interesting activity this cycle particularly on the Mutter front. On top of the performance/lag/stuttering improvements, today Mutter saw the merging of the "X11 excision" preparation patches.

GNOME To Do is full GTK4 these days. Which means it’s both a testbed for new GTK4 features, and also a way to give feedback as an app developer for the GTK team. Unfortunately, it also means To Do is blocked on various areas where GTK4 is lacking.

One of these areas is keyboard shortcut.

Last year, Benjamin wrote a major revamp for keyboard shortcuts. As part of this cycle, I decided to rebase and finish it; and also make To Do use the new API. Unfortunately, I failed to achieve what I set myself to.

Turns out, adding a shortcuts engine to GTK4 is more involving and requires way more context than I had when trying to get it up to speed. I failed to predict that one week would have not been enough to finish it all.

However, that does not mean all the efforts were wasted! The rebasing of the shortcuts engine was a non-trivial task successfully completed (see gtk!842), and I also fixed a few bugs while working on it. I also got a working prototype of GNOME To Do with the new APIs, and confirmed that it’s well suited — at least for a simpler application such as To Do.

In retrospect, I believe I should have been more realistic (and perhaps slightly pessimistic) about the length and requirements of this task.

Given the significant performance benefits to Arm's Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2), they are working on ensuring the open-source Linux compiler toolchains support these new CPU instructions ahead of SoCs shipping that support this big addition.

Arm announced Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) recently as their latest advancement around SIMD programming and increasing data-level parallelism in programs. SVE2 is designed to ultimately deliver better SIMD performance than their long-available Neon extensions and to scale the performance with vector length increases as well as enabling auto-vectorization techniques. More details in this post on SVE2.

Do you have data that you’d like people to be able to explore on their own? Are you always passing around snippets of code to load specific data files? These are problems that people encounter all the time when working in groups and using the same datasources or when trying to distribute data to the public. Some users are comfortable interacting with data entirely programatically, but often it is helpful to use a GUI (Graphical User Interface) instead. With that in mind we have reimplemented the Intake GUI so that in addition to working in a jupyter notebook, it can be served as a web application next to your data, or at any endpoint.

The upcoming Guile 3 release will have just-in-time native code generation. Finally, amirite? There's lots that I'd like to share about that and I need to start somewhere, so this article is about one piece of it: Lightening, a library to generate machine code.

Guido van Rossum is a famous name in the programming world. He is the creator of the Python programming language which was developed back in 1989. It is only since the last few years when this general-purpose programming language started gaining popularity.

The number of Python users has increased significantly and it was not only named as the best programming language by IEEE but also the most asked-about language on Stack Overflow, overthrowing JavaScript — the all-time winner for decades.

When users try Epiphany on Ubuntu, they receive a sub-par, broken browser. If you’re not willing to do this right, please just remove Epiphany from your repositories. We’d all be happier this way. You are the most popular distributor of Epiphany by far, and your poor packaging is making the browser look bad.

You probably know by now that the Librem Tunnel is part of Librem One, a suite of privacy-protecting, no-tracking apps and services created by our team at Purism, which also includes Librem Mail, Librem Chat and Librem Social.

Librem Tunnel offers an encrypted, no-logging, virtual private network tunnel, making sure all your network traffic is secure and your privacy fully protected. This means you can safely and conveniently use any public hotspot and not have to worry about how private your connection really is, using standards-based OpenVPN with any compatible client. You are not the product in Librem Tunnel: you will not be tracked, we do not sell your data, and we don’t advertise.

The world’s two biggest economies are indulged in a trade war and the toll is being paid by the Chinese company Huawei, which is being erased from existence in the US.

The US government has already blacklisted Huawei, causing a big blow to its growing smartphone business across the globe. After the temporary license ends in August, it won’t be able to do any business with US-based companies unless the ban is lifted.

It was previously explained on LinuxHint how to install Snort Intrusion Detection System and how to create Snort rules. Snort is an Intrusion Detection System designed to detect and alert on irregular activities within a network. Snort is integrated by sensors delivering information to the server according to rules instructions.
In this tutorial Snort alert modes will be explained to instruct Snort to report over incidents in 5 different ways (ignoring the “no alert” mode), fast, full, console, cmg and unsock.

If you didn’t read the articles mentioned above and you don’t have previous experience with snort please get started with the tutorial on Snort installation and usage and continue with the article on rules before continuing this lecture. This tutorial assumes you have Snort already running.

After about 5 months of development time, the Fedora Infrastructure team has finally tagged Bodhi 4.0.0. This is a major release with many backwards incompatible changes, and results in a simpler codebase which should ease future development and maintenance.

Packit (https://packit.dev/) is a CLI tool that helps you auto-package your upstream projects into the Fedora operating system. But what does it really mean?

As a developer, you might want to add or update your package in Fedora. If you’ve done it in the past, you know it’s no easy task. If you haven’t let me reiterate: it’s no easy task.

And this is exactly where packit can help: with just one configuration file in your upstream repository, packit will automatically package your software into Fedora and update it when you update your source code upstream.

Furthermore, packit can synchronize downstream changes to a SPEC file back into the upstream repository. This could be useful if the SPEC file of your package is changed in Fedora repositories and you would like to synchronize it into your upstream project.

Packit also provides a way to build an SRPM package based on an upstream repository checkout, which can be used for building RPM packages in COPR.

Last but not least, packit provides a status command. This command provides information about upstream and downstream repositories, like pull requests, release and more others.

This post is the fourth and final introduction to the Fedora Summer Coding interns Class of Summer 2019. In this interview, we’ll meet Niharika Shrivastava and Divyansh Kamboj, who are working on projects to improve Fedora module metadata and add additional security hardening to containers, respectively.

With the help of Natural Language Processing, an organisation can gain valuable insights, patterns, and solutions. Python is one of the widely used languages and it is implemented in almost all fields and domains. In this article, we list down 10 important Python Natural Language Processing Language libraries.

On June 27th, Red Hat will not only be hosting one of the best technical gatherings of 2019, but it will be doing so in Washington D.C. — not San Francisco, Seattle, or ... DevNation Federal conference will bring together industry experts and key maintainers of popular open source projects in a one-day immersive conference for federal developers.

The bug report count of KTextEditor (implementing the editing part used in Kate/KWrite/KDevelop/Kile/…) and Kate itself reached again some value over 200.
If you have time and need an itch to scratch, any help to tackle the currently open bugs would be highly appreciated.
The full list can be found with this bugs.kde.org query.
[...]
The team working on the code is small, therefore please be a bit patient if you wait for reactions. I hope we have improved our reaction time in the last months but we still are lacking in that respect.

In the last month, we’ve polished the user interface and added the last planned features to Blender 2.80. The details can be found in the weekly development notes.
Now we are freezing the user interface, so that there is a stable base for creating documentation and tutorials. Settings will stay in the same place and screenshots should remain valid for the final 2.80 release. A handful of menu entries may be added, or a tooltip might be improved, but nothing major that would break documentation.

In order to meet the July release target for Blender 2.80, there is now an API and user-interface freeze on this next feature update for this leading open-source, cross-platform 3D modeling software.
Blender 2.80 has now entered its UI and API freeze milestone for the 2.80 release. The Blender settings should also be maintained now moving forward for the Blender 2.80 release and its Python API compatibility, including for add-ons.

FreeBSD 11.3 Beta 1

24 May: The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 11.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, arm64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.

While FreeBSD 12 is the latest and greatest stable series since the end of last year, for those still on FreeBSD 11 there is the 11.3 update due out for release in July while this weekend the first beta was issued.
FreeBSD 11.3 offers up the latest security updates and other stable bug fixes over FreeBSD 11.2 that was released nearly one year ago. But for those craving all the latest features and functionality, FreeBSD 12 is in release form or there is also FreeBSD 13-CURRENT.